Spaceship

How to spell spaceship

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce spaceship

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spaceship mean?

1. nounA vehicle designed for travel or operation beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

Spaceship in a sentence

• The museum displayed a full-scale model of a spaceship from the moon landings.

• The film opens with a damaged spaceship drifting silently past a distant planet.

Where does spaceship come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'space' and 'ship'. The word 'space' descends from the Latin spatium, meaning a distance, an interval, or an open expanse, which entered English through Old French as 'espace' during the 1300s. The word 'ship' is far older and native, going back to the Old English 'scip', a seagoing vessel, with cousins across the Germanic languages. The two were welded together as writers began imagining vessels that could travel beyond the Earth, with the compound appearing in print by the late 1800s and becoming common with the rise of science fiction in the early 1900s. Because it is built from two familiar, regularly spelled words, the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single closed word, not 'space ship'.

How the word is built

• space (open expanse beyond Earth)
• ship (vessel)